Orthokostá Read Free Page A

in all its problematical dimensions. And while it was obvious to everybody that Valtinos’s first novel dignified the sacrifices made in a lost ideological cause, it was also impossible for anyone to miss the harsh reality imposed by his telegraphic medium: the actual voices of the nine antigovernment rebels who perished through a variety of mishaps in an inhospitable landscape that forever withheld the redemption of the sea.
    Valtinos’s daring new voice in
The Descent of the Nine
had been preceded by only one Civil War novel worthy of a subject of suchpolitical complexity and demanding such self-examination—Stratis Tsirkas’s
Ακυβέρνητες πολιτείες
(Drifting Cities, 1961–65)—and followed by a mere handful of comparable attempts, such as Yannis Beratis’s
Το Πλατύ ποτάμι
(The Wide River, 1946–65), and Aris Alexandrou’s
Το Κιβώτιο
(The Box, 1974). But these were solitary works; Valtinos has been revisiting the Civil War tragedy in cycles over the years, with narratives both long and short, most powerfully
Orthokostá
(1994). Taken together with Valtinos’s other major works,
Orthokostá
holds pride of place as the most successful testing of the range fiction writing can achieve when plumbing the spaces between language and memory and the shading of the inhuman into the humane. History in the making seems to be the chief end of the present novel, even as its numerous asides imply the impossibility of viewing history divorced from the light of art and thought.

    Valtinos has sandwiched his narrative between two texts, one ascribed to an eighteenth-century cleric named Isaakios, perhaps the last humanist to project the virtues of ancient Arcadia onto the landscape of the southeastern Peloponnese, the Christian monastery in its middle notwithstanding; and the other an epilogue that debunks the good cleric’s utopian opener. Between the extreme sublimation at the outset and the grim realities that have intervened by the end, the novel similarly appears to have two hearts: one beating to the drum taps of the ancient epics, the other to the transport of lyricists like Tyrtaeus, Callinus, and George Seferis.
    It would be natural for an explorer of literary texts to want to prospect, upon first leafing through this book, for the presence of any sign promising the joyful experience of poetry—the aspect of any artifact, in other words, that would determine the quality of the time invested in the reading. If the precritical indicators could serve as guides and
Orthokostá
proved indeed to be the kind of “news that STAYS news,” in Ezra Pound’s definition, they certainly informed theimpact that the book made when it was launched in 1994. A first rather short, page-long chapter, a much longer second, and then a surprising, barely twenty lines long, third must surely have raised intriguing questions regarding the conventions
Orthokostá
embodied. These rough, apperceptive data are the novel’s invitational markers—one thinks of the four initial notes of Beethoven’s Fifth—and a persistent reminder that the general thrust of the narrative and the relationship of its parts to the whole would need to be viewed on an equal footing with its other, more discursive materials.
    Keeping both the content and its organization constantly before the mind’s eye is a balancing act few readers of the prose classics, be they by Montaigne or Tolstoy, manage to maintain.
Orthokostá’
s irresistible human representations, its numerous dramatis personae coming slowly and rather mysteriously into focus, have tended to attract more vocal and more articulate responses than the book’s structure and its semi-transparent message. The terror that spread throughout the Greek countryside during the fratricidal period, roughly between 1943